should collapse with ease.
“You know why I’m doing this,” Janson said.
“Two reasons,” Katsaris said. “Arguably the two reasons you shouldn’t be doing
this.” Katsaris’s hands moved as he spoke, the clicking and snapping of gunmetal
providing a rhythmic counterpoint to his conversation.
“And in my position?”
“I’d do exactly the same,” Katsaris said. He raised the disassembled chamber
pocket of a carbine to his nose, scenting evidence of excessive lubrication.
“The military wing of the Harakat al-Muqaama al-Islamiya never had a good
reputation for returning stolen property.” Stolen property. Hostages especially
those suspected of being assets of American intelligence. Seven years ago, in
Baaqlina, Lebanon, Janson had been captured by the extremist group; his captors
initially thought they had taken an American businessman, accepting his legend
at face value, but the flurry of high-level reactions fueled other suspicions.
Negotiations quickly went off the rails, foundering on power struggles within
the faction. Only the timely intervention of a third party—the Liberty
Foundation, as it later emerged—caused them to alter their plans. After twelve
days of captivity, Janson walked free. “For all we know, Novak wasn’t even
involved, didn’t have any knowledge of the situation,” Katsaris went on. “But
it’s his foundation. Ergo, you owe the man your life. So this lady comes up to
you and says, Baaqlina has come due. You’ve got to say yes.”
“I always feel like an open book around you,” Janson said, his smile crinkling
the lines around his eyes.
“Yeah, written with one time pad encryption. Tell me something. How often do you
think about Helene?” The warrior’s brown eyes were surprisingly gentle.
“Every day.”
“She was magical, wasn’t she? She always seemed so free.”
“A free spirit,” Janson said. “My opposite in every way.”
Katsaris slid a nylon-mesh brush through the bore hole of another automatic
weapon, checking for any cracks, carbon deposits, or other irregularities, and
then he looked straight into Janson’s eyes. “You once told me something, Paul.
Years ago. Now I’m going to tell it to you.” He reached over, placed a hand on
Janson’s shoulder. “There is no revenge. Not on this earth. That’s storybook
stuff. In our world, there are strikes and reprisals and more reprisals. But
that neat, slate-cleaning fantasy of revenge—it doesn’t exist.”
“I know.”
“Helene’s dead, Paul.”
“Oh. That must be why she hasn’t been answering my phone calls.” His deadpan was
masking a world of pain, and not very well.
Katsaris’s gaze did not waver, but he squeezed Janson’s shoulder harder. “There
is nothing—nothing—that can ever bring her back. Do what you want to the Kagama
fanatics, but know this.”
“It was five years ago,” Janson said quietly.
“Does it feel like five years ago?”
The words came out in a whisper. “Like yesterday.” It was not how an officer
spoke to those he commanded. It was how a man spoke to the person with whom he
was closest in the world, a person to whom he could never lie. He exhaled
heavily. “You’re afraid I’m going to go berserk and visit the wrath of God upon
the terrorists who killed my wife.”
“No,” Katsaris said. “I’m afraid that on some gut level, you think that the way
to wipe the slate clean, the way to honor Helene, is to get yourself killed by
them, too.”
Janson shook his head violently, though he wondered whether there could be any
truth to what Katsaris said. “Nobody’s going to die tonight,” he said. It was a
ritual of self-assurance, they both knew, rather than a statement of
probabilities.
“What’s ironic is that Helene always had real sympathy for the Kagama,” Janson
said after a while. “Not the terrorists, not the KLF, of course, but the
ordinary Kagama caught in the middle of it all. Had she lived, she probably
would have been right by Novak’s side, trying to work out a peace agreement. The
Caliph is an archmanipulator, but he exists because there are genuine grievances
for him to manipulate.”
“If we’re here to do social engineering, we’ve been given the wrong equipment.”
Theo ran a thumbnail against a combat knife, testing its keenness. “Besides,
Peter Novak tried that, and look where it got him. This is a strict in-out.
Insertion and extraction.”
Janson nodded. “If everything goes right, we’ll be spending a total of a hundred
minutes on Anura. Then again, if you’ve got to deal with these people, maybe
it’ll help if you know where they’re coming from.”
“If we’ve reached that stage,” Katsaris replied grimly, “everything will have
gone wrong that can go wrong.”
“I won’t mind taking this baby out for a spin,” Honwana said admiringly. He,
Janson, and Hennessy were standing in the gloomy hangar, their eyes still
adjusting from the bright sun outside to the shadows within.
The BA609 was a sea-landing-equipped tiltrotor aircraft; like the discontinued
Ospreys, it had propellers that enabled vertical takeoffs and landings but that,
when tilted to the horizontal position, would enable the craft to function like
a fixed-wing airplane. Bell/Agusta had crafted the fuselage of this particular
specimen not from steel but from a tough molded resin. The result was an
exceptionally lightweight craft that could travel much farther on a liter of
fuel than any conventional design—up to four times as far. Its versatility would
be important to the success of the mission.
Now Honwana ran his fingertips over the nonreflective surface. “A thing of
beauty.”
“A thing of invisibility, if the gods are with us,” said Janson.
“I’ll pray to the ancestors,” Honwana said, with no little mirth. A
Moscow-educated die-hard atheist, he was sympathetic to neither indigenous nor
missionary-spread forms of religiosity.
“There’s a full tank. Assuming you haven’t put on weight since we worked
together last, that should just get us there and back.”
“You’re cutting things close. The tolerances, I mean.” The Mozambican’s eyes
were serious.
“No choice. Not my timetable, not my locale. You might say the KLF is calling
the shots here. I’m just trying to improvise as best I can. This isn’t a
well-scoured contingency plan we’re looking at. More like, ‘Hey, kids, let’s put
on a show.’ ”
“Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a barn,” Hennessy put in heavily. “With a
whole load of high explosives.”
The north coastline of Anura nipped in like a deeply grooved valentine’s heart.
The eastern lobe was mostly jungle, sparsely inhabited. Honwana flew the
tiltrotorcraft low to the ground through the Nikala jungle. Once over the sea,
the plane angled upward, banking nearly forty degrees.
Despite the plane’s curious trajectory, Honwana’s piloting was extraordinarily
smooth, anticipating and compensating for wind currents and updrafts. The
now-horizontal nacelles emitted a steady noise, something between a hum and a
roar.
Andressen and Hennessy were up front with Honwana, part of the crew, providing
essential navigational support; separated by a bulkhead, the two paratroopers
were left alone on uncushioned benches in the rear of the aircraft, to confer
with each other and go through their last-minute preparations.
Half an hour into the flight, Katsaris consulted his shockproof Breitling and
swallowed a 100mg tablet of Provigil. It would adjust his circadian rhythms,
ensuring late-night alertness, without the excessive stimulation and exaggerated
confidence that amphetamines could induce. They were still two hours away from
the drop zone. The Provigil would be in maximal effect during the operation.
Then he took another small pill, a procholinergic that would inhibit
perspiration.
He gestured toward a pair of thick black aluminum tubes that Janson was holding
up to his ear.
“Those things are really going to make it?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Janson said. “As long as the gas mixture doesn’t leak. The little
darlings are going to be full of pep. Just like you.”
Katsaris held up a foil strip of Provigil tablets. “Want one?”
Janson shook his head. Katsaris knew what he was doing, but Janson knew that
drugs could have unpredictable side effects in different people, and he declined
to take substances he had no experience with. “So tell me, Theo,” he said,
putting away the tubes and shuffling the blueprints, “how’s the missus?” Now
that they were not around the others, he once more called his friend by his
first name.
“The missus? She know you call her that?”
“Hey, I knew her before you did. The beautiful Marina.”
Katsaris laughed. “You have no idea how beautiful she is. You think you do, but
you don’t. Because right now she’s positively radiant.” He pronounced the last
word with special emphasis.
“Wait a minute,” Janson said. “You don’t mean she’s … ”
“Early days, still. First trimester. Touch of morning sickness. Otherwise, she’s
doing great.”
Janson flashed on Helene, and he felt as if a giant hand were squeezing his
heart in a crushing grip.
“And we are a handsome couple, aren’t we?” Katsaris said it with mock swagger,
but it was the indisputable truth. Theo and Marina Katsaris were among God’s
favored, perfect specimens of Mediterranean strength and symmetry. Janson
remembered a week he’d spent with them in Mykonos—remembered the particular